Farhan Thawar
VP & Head of Engineering, Shopify. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveengineerfounderinvestor@fnthawar ↗LinkedIn ↗
Farhan Thawar leads Shopify's engineering organization, shaping technical strategy and scaling the infrastructure behind its global commerce platform. He previously co-founded Helpful.com and served as VP of Engineering at Pivotal Labs following its acquisition of Xtreme Labs.
2shows
2appearances
41statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Farhan Thawar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Shopify executes company reorgs in two weeks without formal change management
“So if you're doing something monumental, like, I don't know, you're doing like a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way. Let's like sit down and plan and roll it out. And it's probably like six months in most companies. Shopify, this is like a w…”
Shopify randomly deletes all recurring internal meetings with over two people annually
“Once a year at a random time, we will delete All recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on-ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings. And then we have a two-week moratorium where you're not allowe…”
AI coding tools will reach engineer-level only when they delete code
“What I want to see is GitHub Copilot deleting one million lines of code. Like that's when, you know, we're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer.”
Thawar: Companies without multiple projects on fire are not pushing hard enough
“I think if you don't have like two or three big projects that are on fire, you're probably not pushing hard enough because you're not really trying things that are outside of your, like, if everything's going well, are you really trying, are you really taking …”
Thawar eliminated scheduled one-on-ones while managing 120 direct reports at Xtreme Labs
“I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports and two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones because you can't have a 120 direct reports and do scheduled one-on-ones cause you're never doing anything but one-on-ones. So I said, I'm going to be…”
Thawar instantly resigns without job offers when his framework is violated
“When I realize that my framework is being violated, I will resign like instantly. And I've done that before. So without even having another job or anything, I just go like, oh, my framework is being violated and then resign.”
Thawar calls pair programming the most underutilized engineering management tool
“It is the most underutilized management tool in engineering. Bar none. Like, it is just not used as much as it could be.”
Shopify founders deleted incomplete code after one hour of pair programming
“You know, Toby famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming, and what he would do is he would actually set a timer And him and his, the CTO, Cody, would pair program for one hour, and if they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all th…”
Two engineers pairing with an AI copilot outperforms solo AI coding
“I would still contend take that experience and add two humans together. So you've got like an AI co-pilot and humans, because what's happening is generating code and the two humans can look and say, oh, I know what it's trying to do. And either delete the code…”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke reviews every project in-person every six weeks
“And now we do six week reviews. So teams have this notion of like every six weeks actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resourcing and what they're working on with their immediate leadership, but then also with Toby. And so what's cool …”
Shopify individual contributors average just three hours of meetings per week
“So we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is Phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think it's, I think I tweeted this. I think it's six or seven hours pe…”
GitHub Copilot generated over one million lines of code at Shopify
“Last year I tweeted out you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub Copilot has written over one million lines of code for Shopify”
Shopify will hire one thousand interns in 2025 as full-time job trials
“Like, 25, we're gonna hire a thousand interns, and, like, that is gonna give me a thousand job trials to pick, like, the top, you know, x percent of those to come to Shopify full-time.”
Internal data shows employee alignment degrades with distance from Shopify's CEO
“The farther you are from Toby, the, like we can see things in like the survey results, like the alignment gets out of whack. And so you do actually see that you want to be closer. You want to have a flatter org in general, and that can be achieved by just havi…”
Thawar's first-week architectural decision at Shopify burned 18 months for 100 engineers
“I think I burned. 18 months of time for like a hundred engineers, like literally from the decision I made in the first week of joining Shopify”
Startups can outcompete tech giants for interns without matching their pay
“No matter what company you're at, whether it's large or small, you are able to compete with some of the biggest companies in the world for interns and for talent in general. And it doesn't have to be That you have to pay the intern more.”
Managers should encourage top interns to finish other internships before accepting offers
“I encourage people who I thought did a great job at my company, and I would give them a full-time offer to still finish their internships at other companies, because you want to make sure that you are getting that experience and you figure out, oh yeah, this r…”
Job interviews are notoriously poor predictors of actual candidate performance
“Interviews are not that good at predictor performance.
Actually, it's on the slide.
and it's really just a way for you to figure out if somebody might be a fit for you.
And so the shorter you can make that process, like I wouldn't recommend hours or hours lon…”
Early-stage startups can successfully scale with a one-to-one intern-to-engineer ratio
“So in startups, I like to think of like one-to-one when I was at extreme labs, like by the end there, I put in, you know, we have our ending stat there. We had about 65 interns out of 350 employees, but when we were growing, we had one intern to one engineer.”
Thawar: Billionaire tech founders share irrational multi-decade visions for the world
“They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they have an irrational view of what the world should look like over the next decade or so. They're very long-term thinkers, very rational in that they'll look and say, Hey, 1015, 2025 y…”
Shopify moved all large group announcements off Slack to Meta Workplace
“What we did was we moved all announcement information. So like anytime you're sending a status update or large group announcement, we moved all of that to like Facebook meta workplace, like Facebook for work, basically which is now being deprecated. So we'll h…”
Shopify operates 95 percent remote with intentional in-person annual summits
“So I like to call it like 90% remote or 95% remote because we have these intentionals, intentional IRL experiences. So every summer we just started last year, like, sorry, this year, we're doing this thing called Shopify summit, where we bring the whole compan…”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke starts every new employee at fifty percent trust
“I've seen people use it as a, like, I'm pretty sure Toby says he starts everyone at 50%
and then he gets to know you.”
Startup job trials yielded twenty percent attrition initially but zero percent thereafter
“In the first 90 days, like, 20% attrition before 90 days, because it just didn't work out. But those, after 90 days, we had less than one percent attrition, because they knew exactly what they were getting into, and we knew exactly how they were going to fit.”
The other half of the tape: Farhan Thawar's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 1
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Lenny's Podcast 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Farhan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | VP & Head of Engineering, Shopify | 1 | 25 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | VP & Head of Engineering, Shopify | 1 | 16 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |